


of recoil and grace

by ink_and_essence



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Bucky Barnes Returns, Captain America: The Winter Soldier Spoilers, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-04-22
Updated: 2014-04-26
Packaged: 2018-01-20 06:49:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1500836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ink_and_essence/pseuds/ink_and_essence
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Something is broken in you. Some mechanism that once guided you, like the intricate workings of your left arm that tell your hand when to [open/strike/squeeze] has come loose and is rattling around inside.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _The incident report of Steve Rogers, code name Captain America, concluded with a tersely scrawled,_ Whereabouts of the operative known as the Winter Soldier are unknown. _He wonders giddily if he is honor-bound to correct that statement now. He says again, louder, "Bucky," because he can, because it's been so long since he's had reason to._

It's the smell that makes Steve pause in his doorway: a tang of smoke, and beneath it, sweat and copper and oil. Nothing stirs in the darkness—no strains of 40s pop, for instance, float from his ("vintage") record player—but that smell is not one that belongs in his apartment. Steve lets his hand fall from the light switch to his hip as he drops into a crouch, swiveling on the balls of his feet to put his back against the wall, but of course he grasps only air: he's a civilian now, and all of his firearms were registered to S.H.I.E.L.D.

He glances over his shoulder down the corridor—clear—and eases the door shut behind him. His eyes have already adjusted to the dark by the time he reaches the end of his front hall, moving silently, keeping low. He scoops up his shield without incident and tips his head back, nostrils flaring as he inhales. The smell is stronger toward the kitchen, so that's where he heads. He's about to clear the corners when there is a soft click, and light spills from the little room into the hall: a beckoning, an invitation. 

Whoever's waiting knows Steve's there. 

Steve hesitates for half a heartbeat, then straightens to take that last long stride that will bring him into view. 

A man is seated at Steve's kitchen table. His back is to the corner, away from the windows, facing the entrance. Both of his hands are splayed, palm down, on the table in front of him; the knuckles on the right are thick with recently formed scabs, and the left gleams coldly metallic in the overhead light. He looks younger with his lank, greasy hair pulled away from his face, smaller in an oversized hoodie and faded jeans than he did in his Winter Soldier gear. 

(Later, Steve will ruefully acknowledge that an enemy combatant could have battered down the door to brain him from behind and he would have been too busy gaping like an idiot to do a blessed thing about it.) 

"Bucky," he breathes. 

For weeks following the collapse of S.H.I.E.L.D. and the HYDRA faction that had infiltrated its ranks, Steve searched for signs of where Bucky might have wound up. He enlisted Sam's help and, with considerably more finagling, Natasha's, but their efforts led nowhere but to a hastily abandoned bunker and more questions than he could answer in his incident report to the Department of Defense. (Not even Captain America was exempt from paperwork.) Steve's account was full of more holes than the Winter Soldier had put in him, but how could he detail, in triplicate, the muted horror in realizing, up on the bridge of the helicarrier, that with millions of lives in the balance, Bucky's was the one that mattered? That if Steve had been given the choice, he might have chosen one man over all those names that Zola's algorithm had compiled. 

But it wasn't Steve's call. And Captain America could only ever champion the greater good. 

Knowing that hadn't spared him from feeling a twist of guilt as he slammed Bucky's hand against the glass floor of the helicarrier, and again when Bucky’s grip only tightened around the controller chip. "Let _go_!" Steve begged. 

Bucky sounded close to petulant when he shouted back, "No!" and in that one syllable was an echo of a pigheaded kid from Brooklyn. 

For a moment, they were rolling across the Barnes's living room floor on some sun-drenched afternoon, a tangle of elbows and knees, wheezing with laughter and exertion as Steve wrestled to regain custody of the paint brush or toy soldier or whatever it was that Bucky had pried from his hands moments ago. 

But that circuit board was more than a toy soldier: it represented twenty million innocent lives, and the Winter Soldier was trying to crush them all in his fist. 

_Just let go, Bucky, please. You have to know that I'd do anything, I'd give up everything, except this._ Steve adjusted his grip and hated himself for it when Bucky's next breath came in sharp, just this side of a keen, muscles straining under Steve's hands. At this angle, it wouldn't take much pressure at all to break the elbow, to wrench the shoulder from its socket, but Steve was seized by the ridiculous notion that it would be ten times worse to hurt this flesh-and-blood arm, because it was Bucky's, the one he remembered, the one he had fit under so neatly when his shoulders were still narrow. 

" _Please_ ," he whispered into Bucky's hair, just before the Winter Soldier whipped his head back to smash his skull into the bridge of Steve's nose. He tucked his face into the crook of Bucky's neck to protect the soft tissue. "Bucky, I'm sorry." 

A wet snap, a sickening crunch. Bucky's whole body spasmed as he screamed, high and wild, and Steve tasted bile. He had torn that ugly sound from his friend. 

The incident report of Steve Rogers, code name Captain America, concluded with a tersely scrawled, _Whereabouts of the operative known as the Winter Soldier are unknown._

He wonders giddily if he is honor-bound to correct that statement now. He says again, louder, "Bucky," because he can, because it's been so long since he's had reason to. 

The operative known as the Winter Soldier flinches, the fingertips of his flesh-and-bone hand whitening as he presses it down harder on the tabletop, as though in an attempt to suppress the tremor that runs through his arm at the sound of his name. A battered baseball cap sits on the table next to a stack of pamphlets; beside that is the thick dossier on the Winter Soldier program that Natasha unearthed for Steve, and which had been locked securely in Steve's safe when he left the apartment that morning. 

He stills when Steve leans down to prop his shield against the wall, only his eyes moving to track Steve as he crosses the room. It makes him look somehow vulnerable when the larger man reaches the opposite edge of the table and Bucky has to roll his eyes up to keep them on his face. This close, Steve can tell that the dark shadows under those bloodshot eyes are from exhaustion, not war paint, that Bucky's skin is wan and stretched too thin across his cheekbones. Then Bucky's gaze flits to his throat, his chest, his ribs, in a way that Steve recognizes as calculating: measuring the distance between them, the angle of attack and requisite force to sever Steve's jugular, crush his sternum, puncture his lungs. 

"Ste—" Steve's heart leaps, plummets as Bucky continues, "—ven Grant Rogers." Bucky's speech is tinted with a Russian accent, his voice gravelly with disuse, and he clears his throat before he adds, his mouth twisting with contempt, "Captain America." 

Slowly, so as not to startle him, Steve pulls back a chair. "Just Steve is fine," he says mildly, as he lowers himself onto the seat, "between friends." 

Bucky's right hand convulses, starts to curl into a fist, but he smoothes it flat again. He spits his words through gritted teeth: "We are _not_ —" 

Steve tenses, he can't help it, even though he knows, Nat told him, what it means to be brainwashed, reconditioned, that he can't expect the Bucky he knew to come bouncing back unbroken. But his expression stops Bucky dead, and he stares almost wildly at Steve, his mouth falling open, looking for an instant as unmoored as Steve feels. 

" _Don't_ ," Bucky says, and his tone is almost pleading. 

"Don't what?" 

"Look at me like that." He takes a ragged breath, and then his voice is low again, menacing. "I will put out your eyes if you keep looking at me like that." 

Steve drops his gaze, more for Bucky's sake than his own, tries to marshal his expression. He recognizes the Smithsonian's logo on the topmost pamphlet and picks it up: it's from the Captain America exhibit. The pamphlet is creased, pliant as fabric, the folds white with so much wear that the paper barely holds together, as though Bucky has been keeping it in his pocket and taking it out to read again and again. There are others in the stack, and press releases, printouts, clippings from magazines, all about him, about the Howling Commandoes, about James Buchanan Barnes. "You've been doing your homework," he says evenly. 

"So have you," Bucky replies, canting his head toward the Winter Soldier dossier. The ball of his throat bobs, and he wets his lips. "You _have_ read this?" 

And maybe Steve imagines it, but he thinks that maybe Bucky is hoping he'll deny it. "Twice," he says instead, because he doesn't lie, and Bucky's mouth tightens. 

"Not such a pretty story, is it? Not like yours." Bucky gestures to the Captain America pile with his chin as Steve continues to thumb through it. 

At the bottom of the stack is a plastic-jacketed book that bears a stylized drawing of Steve's shield on the cover and a Dewey Decimal number on the spine. Steve raises a disapproving eyebrow. "Did you steal this? From a _library_?" 

The muscles around Bucky's eye twitch. "You read my file and this is the thing that offends you?" 

"Almost as much as your body odor," Steve snipes. "That's what gave you away, if you were wondering: I could smell you from the hall. When was the last time you showered?" 

Bucky makes a harsh sound in the back of his throat; it takes Steve a beat to realize that it's a laugh. "My last bath was in the Potomac." 

Steve looks at him sharply, tries to read his expression, but it's guarded in a way that Bucky could never keep up when they were younger. After Steve's own impromptu dip in the Potomac, Fury suggested that Steve stay off the grid, let the press assume that Captain America was one of the many casualties of the Project Insight incident. The hospital staff directly involved in his care could be trusted to exercise discretion, and besides, with all eyes fixed on the sky, on the dramatic collision between the helicarrier and the Triskelion, no one had even noticed the fall of one man. No one but Bucky. 

"He'll blame himself if he thinks I'm dead," Steve said. 

Fury arched an incredulous eyebrow. "You ever consider that that thought might not exactly inspire weeping?" 

He shook his head, recalling Bucky's stricken expression as he dangled from the twisted metal of the drifting craft. "Call it a hunch." 

"I've got a couple other names for it," Fury muttered, but he let it go, and relief flooded Steve, loosened the knot he hadn't felt forming in the pit of his stomach. He didn't want to explain why he was so certain that he couldn't have washed ashore without help, that all the fight had left him the instant he switched out the controller chips. 

It's a stab in the dark, but Steve takes it, struggling to keep his tone casual: "It must not have been easy to pull me out of that river with only one working arm." 

"I have many skills." Bucky says it offhandedly, a statement of fact, not the cocksure brag underscored with innuendo that it would have been once upon a time. But for now, for Steve, the affirmation is reward enough, and Bucky must realize it, too, because he scowls. "You didn't know that I was the one who retrieved you." 

"I suspected. Now I know." 

"It meant nothing. I am not this man, this Bucky Barnes, your comrade." He lifts his metal hand for the first time to flick the pamphlet, dismissive, as though it doesn't bear the signs of a dozen re-readings, as though he hasn't been carrying it with him all this time. 

Steve realizes how careful Bucky has been throughout this conversation to keep his hands visible, to show Steve that he means no harm; how much he is working to affect disinterest despite the fact that his very presence betrays his desperate curiosity. How he tracked Steve, broke into his apartment, cracked his safe, and _stayed put_ , making sure Steve knows what's been done, who has done it. Like he's showing off. Like he wants Steve to be impressed. And he catches how Bucky—he won't, he can't think of this man as anyone else—glances at him, a swift, almost nervous flick of the eyes, when Steve is silent for too long. 

Steve reaches across the table to lay a gentle hand on Bucky's forearm, feels his pulse accelerate beneath the thin skin of his inner wrist. "Why are you here, Buck?" 

He can practically see Bucky's composure crack. Maybe it's been splintering for a while now, flaking away at the edges, and it's this blunt, obstinate refusal to forsake the man he was that brings it all down. Bucky closes his eyes for longer than a blink, and when he opens them again, they are overbright. He runs his tongue across his lips, stalling for time. 

Steve gazes steadily at him. 

Bucky looks away. 

"Because you're the man on the bridge," Bucky says at last in a voice gone small, "and I knew you."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it's been a long, long time (haven't felt like this, my dear) since ( ~~i can't remember when~~ ) i've written fic. a thousand apologies, and i hope you're enjoying it so far.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Something is broken in you. Some mechanism that once guided you, like the intricate workings of your left arm that tell your hand when to [open/strike/squeeze] has come loose and is rattling around inside._

You leave him breathing on the riverbank.

There is no space in you for questioning, for doubt. No space for self-reflection, once a decision has been made, and you use that to walk away, to keep walking.

There will be no returning, after this. A piece of you still tries to direct your steps toward that cold room beneath the earth where you woke, where you would sleep, but you force yourself forward where you should turn, to turn where you should continue forward.

You reorient your strategy to minimize detection in an urban environment. Find dry clothes in a donation drop box. A hat. Gloves. You stay on the move. Pick up an unattended backpack in a café. Reconnoiter via news reports and civilian conversation in all-night diners—propaganda and hearsay, but there is intelligence to be gleaned from them:

HYDRA has been compromised.

S.H.I.E.L.D. dissolved.

The target lives.

His face on the television is mostly healed, but he is frowning. (He is forever frowning, you think, and the observation troubles you, and you can't make sense of why you think you should know what he looks like when he smiles.)

Something is broken in you. Some mechanism that once guided you, like the intricate workings of your left arm that tell your hand when to [open/strike/squeeze] has come loose and is rattling around inside. You felt it twisting, up there, when the target let his shield fall. (Did not drop it. _Let it fall._ ) In the face of destruction, humans are programmed to fight, to struggle, to do anything in their power to survive. The target broke protocol and did not reassert it when you pressed your advantage. You expected him to curse you. You expected him to beg for his life. You did not expect him to speak nonsense.

"You've known me your whole life." (Negative.) "You're my friend." (Negative.) "I'm with you 'til the end of the line." (Meaningless.) Meaningless. And yet that twisting piece inside you snapped.

You knew, suddenly, that the target could be salvaged. He could recover. You could let him.

Then the floor of the craft tore away, and you were watching the target grow small beneath you.

It might have ended there.

But your hand opened, and you struck the surface of the water close to where he fell, and when your fingers found the target's shoulder harness, you told them to squeeze tight around it.

On the riverbank, you watched him for a minute, two. You would hold position until he regained consciousness, and you would ask him… (What? _What?_ ) There was not enough room in you for questioning. Not yet.

And so you left, but you left him breathing.

#

To pass time, you observe the civilians around you. You haven't had that luxury, before. In particular you note occurrences of nonviolent contact. The gentle press of bodies in a crowd, a handshake, an embrace. The way a young woman grips her friend's arm as she leans into a laugh. The way a father ruffles his child's hair. The way a man's arm around his partner's waist shifts from doting to defensive when he notices you staring. Every deliberate touch can be assigned emotional weight, you realize. A brief kiss on the cheek, companionable. A long kiss on the mouth, passionate. A hand on the shoulder, sympathetic, comradely.

You have never known a touch to not inflict pain.

When exhaustion dogs your heels, you curl up in abandoned doorways, under bridges. No one looks too closely, but the world is too loud to let you doze for more than a few minutes at a time. You stay a night in a hostel that left its back door propped open. The proximity of so many bodies in shared quarters should put you on edge, but you find it strangely comforting. Almost familiar. You sleep, at least, in a fashion.

At breakfast, a young woman sits across from you. Smiles. This expression, directed at you, scrapes like shrapnel under your skin. When she asks where you are from, her vowels stretch and shorten in the same places as yours.

<Moscow,> you tell her in Russian, as fluidly as you would if accosted by border guards. <I am here for pleasure, to sightsee.>

The girl laughs. <Nice try.> She continues in English, "You are good, but not that good."

<What do you mean?>

"Your accent. Don't be embarrassed, all of you Americans have one, you can't help it."

<I'm not American,> you snarl. 

She starts to laugh again, but something in your face makes her falter. She shrugs, uneasy. "Canadian, then."

Moscow is a lie, yes, but your hometown, eighty kilometers east, is too much identifying information. When you try to recall the name, though, it slips away in the murk of your mind, oily as a fish. Your chair clatters to the floor behind you. The buzz of conversation in the mess hall dwindles. Your footfalls keep time with the quickened beat of your pulse.

On the bulletin board behind the front desk, you spot a flyer boasting a permanent Captain America collection at the Smithsonian Institution downtown. A shrine, as though the target is dead.

He was, you learn. Dead for decades, and so [ ~~were you~~ / ~~are you~~ /is _he_ ]. He looked very much like you, the dead man, Barnes. ("Bucky," the target called you on the street. A diminutive form of Buchanan. Affectionate.) You scrutinize the face on the display, hunt for differences. Shorter hair. Gentler eyes. An easy grin. He is not you, of course. You are alive, and he died long ago, you read, from (you forget to breathe, for a moment only) a fall.

The bill of your hat pulled low, you stalk through the exhibit, scour placards about its subject. Rogers looks serious in the photographs, staunch, determined. A video shows him poring over cartographic maps and directing troops, eyebrows furrowed, mouth set in grim lines. The scene shifts, and there is Barnes again, bumping shoulders with the target, his words drowned out by a narrative voiceover as he says something that makes Rogers lean into him, laughing. Even in the grainy black-and-white film, the target's whole face brightens like the sun after the passing of a cloud. Barnes turns aside, and still, Rogers beams at him, fondness writ large.

You do not understand why your chest abruptly constricts.

#

You keep moving. West for a while. North. Pick the pockets of careless men at truck stops, bars. Take the cash and dump the rest. Avoiding contact. You are, after all, a ghost.

It is easier to nap in the woods along the stretches of highway. But there are times when you wake sweating, disoriented, and startle at the glint of moonlight where your left sleeve has ridden up your wrist. A coldness uncurls in the pit of your stomach that you will later catalog as fear. It blossoms into terror as you claw at your sleeve, yank it higher up your arm only to reveal more metal. Then alertness catches up to you, and you remember. This is your arm (now). This is you (now).

#

[You/he] catch[es] up with [him/you] in Brooklyn.

The target has signed a lease a few blocks from where his biographies say he grew up, though he can afford the rent in a better neighborhood. You observe him for a while, from a distance. It would take appallingly little effort to complete your mission: Rogers is a creature of habit, and he is frequently alone. He goes running most mornings, then directly to the gym, then to a park or a café with outdoor seating, where he reads the daily paper, draws. To the cinema on Saturday, alone. To a Sunday morning service, alone.

You cannot name with confidence the expression that lingers most often in the cast of his eyes, the cant of his head, and this bothers you. You prefer to follow him when he wanders the streets, gazing at the city around him with such puzzlement and awe that you almost lose him, sometimes, so distracted are you by studying the focal point of his attention, trying to understand what he sees.

Then comes the day when you watch his back only until it disappears around the corner. You double back, gain entry to his apartment. For a few slow breaths, you consider the shield he has left near the entryway, tap it derisively with the toe of your boot, but ultimately leave it be.

The interior of Rogers's home is spare and neatly kept. You trail your fingertips along the spines of the books and record sleeves that line his shelves. Pick up the few pieces of baseball memorabilia he has on display, replace them at precisely the same angle. You heft his coffee mug in your right hand. His straight razor, his comb. You are leaving prints everywhere. You want to.

In the back of the closet in the main bedroom is a small safe. You could tear the door off its hinges, but you work the dial instead, get the combination within four tries (his mother's birthday). Inside, you find Rogers's identifying papers, a modest stack of cash, and a thick folder stamped with Cyrillic. Two photographs are paper-clipped to the inside of the cover. One is of Barnes in uniform with a sergeant's stripes on his shoulder, smiling tightly at the camera. The other is of you, unconscious, the seam of your shoulder still raw where metal bites into flesh.

Paging through the dossier in that closet that smells faintly of lavender, you might as well be back in the Smithsonian, skimming descriptions of strangers. You scan medical procedural notes, mission reports with your code name printed across the top, and feel nothing that approaches recognition. You want to sit to read the rest but decide against the edge of bed, immaculately made as it is; you would never be able to replicate those hospital corners.

The next time you pace to the window, the streetlights have come on. You catch a gleam of gold, a rolling gait as familiar to you now as the whirs and clicks of the mechanisms in your left arm. Your fingers curl around the edge of the curtain. If he looks up, he might see you, but he doesn't look. Rogers slows to a stop at the crosswalk, and you study his face.

It's melancholy, you realize suddenly. That expression.

The walk signal flicks on.

There is still plenty of time for you to disappear.

#

You hear the door open, and you wait.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so i guess chapters from bucky's second-person pov are gonna be a thing, now.  
> (i don't have a plan i'm so sorry)


End file.
